I came across this story from NPR about a lost Malcolm X speech, which has recently been uncovered 50 years after it was given at Brown University. I think it is a reminder of our capacity to think rebelliously while pursuing an education at an Ivy League institution.

Kieran, could you begin by dealing with the mispelling in the topic name? You can do that by pressing the "Move" button top right, and then moving the topic to one that doesn't misspell the title. Then you could edit it the page and change its parent topic from SanjayMurtiIntro, which has nothing to do with it, to whatever topic you think it relevantly connects to. If there isn't one, parent it to WebHome, please.

These matters aside, the next useful revision would be to give the reader you are trying to interest the gist of the idea(s) you found in the speech, and something a little more specific by way of the idea those ideas generated in you.

-- KieranCoe - 05 Feb 2012

Neat article, but I could use some help to see more ways Malcolm X’s lecture at Brown ties into the themes of the class or our law school experience. However, on one level, it did remind me that while law school is not perfect is many ways in relation to the curriculum and such, it does present a great opportunity to attend talks on a lot of fascinating topics. My small liberal arts college certainly didn't offer this. Granted a non pizza lunch may have been advertised, but it's so refreshing to hear people speak with passion on whatever. Ultimately, I want to listen to what anyone with a bold voice says. I feel deprived of this experience sometimes because it's hard to get passion conveyed from lectures on a casebook. Anyway, it was interesting to read that after his lecture “Malcolm X invited students to come talk to him in the student lounge. "At that point, he conducted an interview with these young white students," [the student] continues. "He was willing to greet them more intimately and in private, and obviously he was seeking publicity. He wanted to be as well-known as possible, but I don't know — it definitely is a gesture to make towards young white students, who, by all accounts, he wouldn't really want to have anything to do with, but he was willing to greet them and talk to them in private." Thanks for sharing.

-- LizzieGomez - 07 Feb 2012

I intended to return to this thread last month, but unfortunately lost my way. The reason this article originally appealed to me is that I do not think that academic institutions like Columbia provide sufficient opportunities for viewpoints far outside the mainstream to be expressed. I would support the establishment of fora to hear the opinions of even controversial figures with whom I might vehemently disagree because I think that even extreme political viewpoints are an essential feature of academic diversity.

On the one occasion my fallible memory can recall Columbia allowing a deeply polemical figure to speak, I do not recall the speaker being given a fair opportunity to express himself. I refer to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to our campus in September 2007. While I harshly condemn the Iranian President's views on a host of topics, I do not think it was in the spirit of academic fair mindedness for University President Bollinger to address Ahmadinejad during the introduction by saying:

“Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator... You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”

I would like to see even the most divisive figures visiting this campus given a fair and reasonable opportunity to express themselves. In my personal opinion, it can be a strong tactic to just give someone who has no idea what she is talking about an unrestrained opportunity to speak freely. Just this week the Honorable Junior Senator from my fair state of Wisconsin, a venerable Tea Party darling, suggested that women don't need birth control coverage because they can find it free by just googling the term "birth control." source. We do not always need to exclude, insult, or even debunk people with whom we disagree. Sometimes we just need to give them enough rope to hang themselves.

-- KieranCoe - 28 Mar 2012